Sign Language
by Sair1
Summary: Chouji's not waking up. Neji's on teh drugs –- well, painkillers, anyhow. And guilt is eating Shikamaru alive. (Spoilers thru 196.)


Title: Sign Language  
Author: Sair  
Rating: PG  
Summary: Chouji's not waking up. Neji's on teh drugs –- well, painkillers, anyhow. And guilt is eating Shikamaru alive.  
Warning: Explosive pretentious wank! Super good OOC funtime! Spoilers thru 196!  


Shikamaru is convinced fake leather has a memory: he has begun to refer to the small hollow in this particular armchair as his butt crater. He suspects this chair knows him, recognizes him, because the shallow impression where stuffing rises through two holes like soft dough is always warm as though he has never left it. He has told Chouji as much, but Chouji has declined to comment on the matter. Chouji has been in a coma for almost four days, now. 

_Chouji has been in Medullary Paralysis for almost four days,_ he corrects himself, though he's not sure if that's proper usage, if one can be _in_ Medullary Paralysis or if one simply fails to wake up. He has watched those words steadily, staring at the sheet clipped to the head of Chouji's bed through boredom and half-tears and eyes so blurry that the kanji smear, each blue stroke rendered as large and clumsy as a thumb print by exhaustion. But such words do not blink; he is close to giving up; he feels supremely outclassed in this contest of wills. 

Sometimes, he leaves. He tumbles through his bedroom window at two a.m., pulling the same scroll from the same shelf and gazing at the definition long after he has finished reading it, moonlight cutting cleanly across knees; the back of one hand; the gentle curve of his chin. Sometimes he carries the medical scroll with fading illustrations in red ink, through it rests on the linoleum and he does not open it. 

Sometimes he understands the language of the nurses' habits, the codified meanings of dilated pupils and relaxed muscles. Such clarity makes him sit very straight, very still. 

When Shikamaru feels it, it is something neither monumental nor dismissible – like the bottom of his stomach has torn, and there's only an empty, wrinkled sack at the center of him. Then he remembers he is late to sit with Neji (even when he is early), hitches the seat to his ass and goes scuttling across the hall like a crab in a wood-frame shell. 

Neji wakes up. Neji talks, albeit in a broken and rambling fashion. 

(And maybe rambling is an inaccurate descriptor, for Neji's sentences are populated by standard numbers of nouns and verbs: it is the breadth of his pauses that lends them a somewhat epic span. They sprawl across the afternoons, a set of repetitive syllables to match Neji's slow, even breathing. _How are you feeling? Fine, I guess._

In these hours when Shikamaru has found himself haunted by silence, he takes the benediction of conversation gladly.) 

-- 

Asleep now, the entire length of Neji Hyuuga is curled tightly around one unhurt shoulder, so that the thin white tee-shirt catches on his last rib and exposes a back wound four times over in gauze. Shikamaru watches that bone and the vertebra below it, how the cloth stretches taut on the crest of each breath. Neji was in shock when they found him, quiet and shivering and both palms pressed to the hole just below his clavicle. 

(Chouji did not bleed. Chouji was unhurt. Shikamaru was smiling, relieved, extending a hand that splintered through sunlight, and the glare left him momentarily colorblind. He waited, but Chouji did not move.) 

Neji stirs, ankle deep in blankets and tangling further. When he turns, he moves warily of the thick bandages at his chest, and Shikamaru finds himself wondering if wounds like that scar or just stay open forever, a thumb's width lined by dead muscle and blood vessels. Shikamaru imagines a boy with a shadow above his heart, entry and exit wound in perfect symmetry. 

...But he is staring into Neji's open eyes, narrowed though still sleepy. "Shikamaru?", he says after a moment, eyebrows meeting in – impatience? Consternation? 

"Me again," Shikamaru confirms, smiling a little self-consciously. It has become a routine between them – Neji never fails to be mildly puzzled at the presence of a classmate, even when it's the same one four days running. Shikamaru asks: _How are you feeling_, his lines in this peculiar recital. He is here for the role of concerned friend aged ten to fifteen, though he is unsure it's a convincing performance. 

Because there are moments when his attention snags on a color, an empty cup, on Neji's eyes, flickering guiltily to the drip anchored in his right hand, and when he hears _Alright, I guess,_ he registers it peripherally as a lie. Shikamaru has enough sense to recognize he's overtired and insincere, but words come more slowly. By then Neji is speaking, gazing levelly at him. 

"Why are you here?" 

There is only brief anger before Shikamaru concedes to established facts: Neji Hyuuga is an asshole. _Because I'm having trouble sleeping_, or _Because I know no one else will_ – he's not sure which Neji will find more insulting, so he settles on shrugging. 

"Can I get you anything?" he asks instead. Frustration tugs at the corners of Neji's mouth, crossing the middle ground in a terse frown. Then his features relax into a more familiar expression: condescension coupled with politeness. 

"Some orange juice, please," Neji says, and Shikamaru nods. 

There is a vending machine in the hall. He drops a few coins into the slot, presses C, 8, 9 because it sounds good, because his thumb is closest. Numbness is just a silence when all the particles of a lazy body stop humming, and he feels it in his skin as his forehead slips down the cool glass. Inside the case droplets quiver and break. He knows he will go home tonight; he knows he might not come back. 

But when he pulls back the curtain, Neji is asleep again. 

Shikamaru stands there, plastic knotting in his fist. Neji lays on his side, knuckles gone white as they twist around the sheet. He's not oblivious to the parallel, how you can force a hand or read it, how fingers can say _this hurts like hell_ more readily than tongues or lips. 

The curtain falls and he is crossing the room. He's not sure what he's doing before he's doing it–touching, once, testing. Then: dragging his nails lightly across the back of Neji's hand, the way his mother used to comfort him when he was a child. 

He draws a circle; he draws a star; he draws an gray elephant wearing three-tiered crown. The aluminum is warm and there is a puddle of condensation under the juice can by the time he runs out of subjects, so he slows and tracks the length of Neji's wrist, back and forth in the falling twilight. 

Now is just a pause. Now is just a hesitation. Now is just a breath between words. 

He knows he can wait. 

--BMT  
12.12.03 


End file.
